


Morning In The Burned House

by Go0se



Series: Whoever's At Home [2]
Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, College, Gen, High School, Inspired by Poetry, Kind of a notfic, Mother-Son Relationship, Not A Fix-It, Pregnancy, Supernatural Elements bc everything is terrible, only a little bit though, well only a little bit of a fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-02-03
Packaged: 2018-05-17 23:39:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5889574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Timothy John Wright, from birth to mid-2013. </p><p>(An AU where Tim's mom stayed with him.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _Please note that the "canon-typical violence" tag up there also applies to canon warnings._ Medication, occasional blood, supernatural terribleness, seizures, hospitals, bullying/aloneness, self-loathing, Tim Wright's entire life. Be safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And then this! I cannot even believe. Sort of a from-the-archives post because I started it a long time ago, but I've also spent a lot of time wrangling this to the ground and re-writing it over the last couple days/weeks so I don't even know, man. Have it. It is yours now. I hope you enjoy. (Please tell me if you find any typos.)  
> Title stolen directly from a Margaret Atwood poem, which can be found [here](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/morning-burned-house#).
> 
>  
> 
> ////

Janet Wright smokes through two and a half months before realizing that she hasn't made a trip to the corner store for tampons since she and Mark broke up. A drugstore test confirms what she'd expected. She gives away all her cigarettes after that. Her boss commends her for finally quitting; her friends look at her like she's grown another head. At home she studies herself in the mirror to see if she's changed.  
At first, she can't tell anything.

There's a clinic she could make an appointment at to rewind all of this. She thinks about it at her kitchen table over a long weekend, her hands itching for nicotine and her eyes getting sore. The radio keeps her company.

Two full boxes of tissues later she stands in front of the mirror again, shirtless and pressing on her abdomen for something that isn't even there yet. Janet calls up her mother and, with a shaking voice, shares the news of a grandchild.  
Janet is twenty-three years old. She's over-tired and afraid. She's in love.

 

When her belly gets visibly round under her work uniform her boss calls her to the office and tells her she should take a few months away “for her health” but that her spot will be saved when she comes back. Janet nods through the meeting and the 'congratulations'. She packs up her stuff.  
She arrives at her home, sits down and cries again. It's become a reflex. There’s no one there to see her, anyway. She drinks hot water to soothe her throat and promises herself, and the child who's much more of a reality now, that she'll get them through this.  
  
Her son is born in the middle of August, 1987. He's nine pounds and change, strong lungs, a shock of hair already on his head. She names him Timothy after his grandfather (who her cousin called with the news while Janet rested), and then John after herself. He is tiny and fragile and unbelievably solid in her arms.

  
*

  
Timothy grows.

He’s a bit of a difficult toddler, but affectionate. He loves drawing (“drawing”) in all the colours he can get and he loves the Peter Pan movies. When he plays by himself he spends a lot of time staring into space, like he’s composing a long story in his head, then goes right back to playing with his toys. He talks to imaginary friends as soon as he can talk.  
That’s where his imagination can go overboard. Janet loses count of the times he runs to her with tears in his eyes, saying that some of his friends had been mean to him. She tries to get him to tell her more about them, because, she assures him, things are less scary when you talk about them. What do they look like? What are their names?  
  
Timothy knows that the things he sees don’t have names. His plushies have names; his friends don’t. Timothy can’t explain it very well. Sometimes all he sees are lights, like little pixie fairies, and he likes those. But sometimes the things he sees and hears are _scary_. He doesn’t actually think they’re very friendly, but the kids on the TV have ‘imaginary friends’ and Mommy says that _he_ has imaginary friends, so that’s what they must be. He knows that some of them are tall, really tall, and others of them have wings, but they’re all different. The most he can say is that they scare him. He snuffles and shakes a little, trying to explain.  
Mommy gets a Kleenex or a cloth for his eyes and his sore nose. She tells him to tell his friends to _go away_ if they’re mean to him.

It’s hard to talk when he’s scared, but he tries. Sometimes his friends listen. Sometimes they don’t.

When they don’t it makes Timothy want to stay near Mommy, but he doesn’t want to make her Upset  so he goes to play in his room instead.  
Mommy gets Upset with him at breakfast sometimes. He doesn’t want to eat the pancakes she makes because they have bananas in them and he _hates_ bananas, and then she tells him to get some cereal instead, so he does, but then drops the milk or the spoon for his cereal and it goes all over the table. Timothy doesn’t mean to. He tells Mommy he’s sorry. Sometimes Mommy nods and gets a cloth Timothy can use to clean it up, but sometimes she sighs out loud or leaves the kitchen for a little while. She _is_ only gone for a little while, but it feels like a long time.  
Timothy makes sure to say ‘thank you’ when she re-pours the milk into his cereal bowl. He doesn’t know why he gets all shaky. But he knows he’s four, which is still a little kid, and it’s okay if he can’t do some stuff because he’s still learning, and the important part is to try. So he tries not to be shaky, really hard. He hopes he’ll be better when he’s big enough to go to school.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Timothy is four and a half and folded into his mom's arms at the doctor's office. He doesn't quite remember what happened to get him there. He was at a playgroup with other kids, which is exciting but  scary, and he was trying to be nice to them; but he fell, and then everyone else got really nervous.

Mommy’s still nervous. He can tell because she keeps tapping her heel on the floor and making him jiggle, although she never lets go enough for him to fall off her lap.  
The doctor's office is very bright. It makes his head twinge, so he hides his face in Mommy’s shoulder. It’s only a little hurt, though. Sometimes he had headaches so bad he yelled to let the hurting out through his mouth and his lungs. He knew about lungs because Santa had given him a book last Christmas where a little kid talked about her skin that bundled her in and the rest of her body. Timothy can't read yet, but he knows some things. Mommy said he was very smart and she was very proud of him for trying.  
When the doctor comes in Timothy’s mom puts him down on the big chair in the middle of the room. It’s fun being up there. Timothy swings his feet a little. Then the doctor turns around from the pieces of paper she had been looking at, so Timothy stops. He lets the doctor look at his eyes once she promises not to use the little light-stick she had, because Timothy’s head hurt and looking into that light would make it hurt more. Then he breathes in really deep while the doctor listens to his chest. In, out.  
Then the doctor says, “You’re all done!”  
So he hops back off the big chair and onto the normal one beside his mom. She opens her arms to him and he climbs back in her lap again and puts his head down on her shoulder.  
He waits while the doctor and Mommy talked in serious voices with big words that weren't meant for Timothy to understand. The doctor says 'brain' a lot. A brain was part of your body, like lungs. It lived in your head and was the boss of your body.  
The doctor thinks there’s something wrong with Timothy's head. His mom's arms keep squeezing and squeezing around him.  
  
  
*

  
When Timothy is five and a half he starts kindergarten. His teacher’s name is Mrs. Hill, and there’s another lady he talks to a lot named Mrs. Rivers, and his school’s name is Eastforest Elementary. That’s a lot of nature names. The school’s pretty and Mrs. Hill is nice, but it's still really hard.  
You go to school to learn. But Timothy has trouble learning. Everything's so loud all the time. He keeps trying to pay attention, but he can’t _._ His imaginary friends keep trying to call him to the window during quiet time. He can’t think about one thing for very long. He’s all clumsy, and shaky, worse than the other kids in his class are. It makes him upset. Sometimes it makes him Upset, too, and then he starts to cry, and that makes everything worse.

Mrs. Rivers teaches him to take deep breaths when he thinks he’s going to get Upset, and that he should go sit by himself for a while if he thinks breathing won’t help. She says, “Everyone needs a little break sometimes, Timothy.” That’s true, but he still doesn’t like it. It doesn’t seem fair.

 

It's harder to read for him that it seems like for the other kids. Mommy says the only way to get better is to practice. Practicing is hard in his classroom. He has more luck practicing reading at home, so Mrs. Hill gives him little worksheets to bring back every morning. She calls it a “teacher job”.

The big kids from grade four that come read with his class just say that it's homework. They feel bad he already has to do it, saying that usually kindergarteners don't get homework. It’s true. None of the other kids have to bring stuff back from home except for notes about field trips.

Sometimes he wishes that he could spend all the time at home. He could bring the worksheets and practice writing stuff and counting numbers. Mrs. Hills teaches his class about manners and habitats and stories from all over the world and maps and weather, and she was really nice, but Timothy's mom could definitely teach him all that. It'd be easier to practice and learn where it was quiet. and his mom could watch him in case he fell. It wouldn’t be so embarrassing if he got a headache so bad he can't do anything except sit on the ground and yell, which happened sometimes, even though he knows that that isn't something a big kid should do anymore. He could eat stuff in the fridge instead of his teacher having to set him up a sandwich for lunch along with the other kids. It would work.  
Timothy knows his mom has to go to work really soon after he goes to school every day, though, and she always looks tired when he gets home from after-school daycare. He decides not to say anything.

 

  
You go to school to make friends, too. To make friends you need to be nice and talk to people. Talking with the other kids is hard. Timothy doesn’t really know how. He wishes he had a brother or sister, so he would’ve learned before he got to school. He’d even take a cousin the same age as him. Mommy has a cousin who Mommy says is _kind of_ Timothy’s cousin too, but he’s met his mom’s cousin and he calls her Aunt Charlotte, so that doesn’t make any sense. And anyway, it’s not the same thing. Most of the other kids have brothers or sisters, at least one. (Some of the other kids have more than one that go to Eastforest, even, in all different grades.) Almost all of them have cousins that are their age. They learn about family in the middle of fall, and they talk about their families, and make drawings out of them and try to write their names.

The other kids’ lists go on and on. Timothy’s is short. Barely five people. Maybe that’s why he’s so different.

 

On the last day of school there’s a class assembly. That means that all the kids stand at the front of the classroom and all of the parents and grandparents and foster-parents and aunts come in, and the adults sit in the tiny kid chairs which is pretty funny. The kids say something about what they learned that year, sing a song that Mrs. Hill taught them, and then there’s a lot of clapping. Then most of the kids get their outdoor shoes on and leave with their adults.

  
Timothy stays behind, because Mommy needs to talk to his teacher. Her and Mrs. Hill stand by themselves in the corner of the classroom for a while. Timothy stays at the water table centre, which is over by the window that looks out at the playground. He can hear what his mom and the teacher are saying if he holds his breath a little. He'd get in trouble if they knew he was listening, so he pretends not to be. He plays with the toy boat in the water. It floats down the stream from the trickling tap to the drain, over and over.  
Mrs. Hill says, “I know his condition does bring some behavioral problems--”  
Timothy’s mommy says, “Has he been having problems?”  
Mrs. Hill says, “He… sometimes. Ma’am, I don’t think Timothy is a bad child. Not at all. But he has presented some issues in the class, and I think they may get worse as he gets older.”  
Mommy says, “I see.”  
Mrs. Hill says, “Have you considered taking him to a specialist?”  
  
Timothy doesn’t hear what his mom says next because he is getting Upset. He stops paying attention to what the grown-ups are saying and takes lots of deep breaths so he doesn’t start to cry.  
His boat knocks into the side of the plastic tub and tips over, filling with chlorine-smelling water and sinking to the bottom with a gentle bump. Timothy fishes it out and sets it near the tap again.

  
/


	2. Chapter 2

Timothy is six and he’s passed into grade one. It’s even harder than kindergarten but it’s kind of nice to see the same kids that were in his class again.

  
He still can't read very well. His mom takes him to see a different doctor. This one puts burning drops in his eyes, studies them with a detective’s glass and then writes something down on a piece of paper. Later, his mom takes him to the store and gets him glasses. He feels weird wearing them at first. It makes reading a little easier, which is nice, but some of the other kids in school call him “four eyes” which isn't nice at all.

His mom says that those other kids are just being mean because they're not used to things being different than them, and that a lot of kids in the school have glasses.  
Timothy knows that that’s true, they do. He feels a little better.  
She lets Timothy pick out any colour he wants. He goes with yellow because it's the same colour as bumblebees.  
  
  
His yellow glasses break when Timothy wanders into the woods at night without realizing what he's doing.

His friends are quiet. There are fireflies all around him. Mud's all over his shoes. The moon is full, close. Something hums and cracks.

  
  
In the morning he doesn't remember anything that happened, where the mud came from or why his glasses broke. His head _hurts_. There's fireflies all around him and his hands are bleeding.  
He walks through the woods until he finds a clearing that has a parking lot and then sits down in it, crying, until a worried lady holding a baby on her hip comes over to him and asks where his parents are. He tells her, hiccupping, that he doesn’t know where he is. She puts her hand to her head, then tells him to stay there, and she goes back to her car.  
A teenager steps out of it after the lady says something through the window. She walks over to Tim and says her name’s Katie. She sits down with him as the woman with the baby-- Katie's mom-- drives off to find the park police and tell them there's a lost child. Timothy keeps holding his broken glasses because he doesn’t know what else to do.

The police come and pick him up. They take him to a police station where he drinks water and washes the mud off, and after they put some bandages on his cuts they drive him home.  
Timothy is tired and uncomfortable. The police car has weird grates on the back seat, so it’s like he’s talking through a fence.  They ask him if he knows what street he lives on.

He does. Mom had taught him that in case he ever got lost; he hadn’t thought he would, but he’s glad she taught him, otherwise they’d just drive around forever and ever. He thought that police knew where everyone lived, but maybe not.

It's near lunchtime when he walks up to his front door. Timothy feels weird seeing it now that he didn’t even remember leaving after he got back from school yesterday. He doesn’t say anything except that it’s his house. A police-lady stands behind him with her hand on his shoulder, and her partner waits on the step outside.  
His mom opens the door before the police lady can knock twice. The whole apartment smells like smoke and the undersides of her eyes are all red. When she sees Timothy she picks him up even though it's not good for her back, and she hugs him super tight, crying a little onto his shoulder.  
Timothy's tired of crying by that point, but he can't help it. He tears up too.

The park police talk to his mom after she puts him down and shoos him into the kitchen where there's some cold eggs and toast with honey waiting for him. He takes one of the chairs by the back wall of the kitchen, so he can still see the door from where he sits at the table. His mom tells the police she'd woken up at seven o'clock to make them both breakfast and he’d been gone. The police nodded, and called Timothy “runaway”. His mom is still a little teary, but she listens to whatever the lady is saying and she keeps her hand over her mouth.  
The police were being wrong, though. It wasn’t true, he wasn’t a runaway, he hadn’t _ran_ anywhere except to the parking lot. He’d just—been lost, like the woman from the parking lot who'd helped him had said. That word made him think of Peter and the Lost Boys and that he wishes he could be more like them. He sniffles a little, putting down his fork to wipe his eyes.  
“Thank you,” his mom says to the police officers, and then she shuts the door.

 

It’s quiet for a few seconds before she walks over to the table, hurried but not worried anymore. “Oh, Timothy,” she says, and she sounds sad.  
Timothy hates making her sad. He rubs his eyes harder, and sniffles a little more because he can’t stop. He only looks up when he feels her smooth down his hair.  
She kisses his forehead and then the top of his head, staying there for a little while. “What am I going to do with you,” she mutters, but it’s not like she’s really talking _to_ him.  
She ruffles his hair and then stands up, handing him his toast so she can take the rest of his plate to the microwave. Her voice is a little more normal, less sad, when she asks him if he wants orange juice or salt on his eggs.  
It’s an old joke. He’s supposed to say, “I don’t want _orange juice_ on my _eggs,_ ” and then they’re both supposed to laugh. But he doesn’t really feel like joking, so he just says “Yes, please”.  
His mom must not feel like joking, too, because she just nods and opens the fridge.  
  
Over the whole rest of the day she doesn’t mention him “running away”, so he doesn’t either.  
  
  
*

 __  
  
Timothy grows out of Peter Pan and into Peter Parker after he turns seven. Comics are easier to read than regular books so his mom gets him a lot. He likes Spiderman best, ‘cause he lives in an apartment like Timothy and his mom do and ‘cause he's a kid. (A big kid, yeah, but still not an adult like most of the other superheroes). Timothy gets a stuffed red and blue bear for Christmas and names him Peter.

 

It's around that time that he and Mom stop going to church. Timothy doesn’t know why, but he can guess: he’d had _an episode_ in the church’s little back room where the kids stayed while the adults were doing the serious part of mass. The adult’s called it a playgroup, and the room did have colouring books and some toys and stuff, but really it was just a holding pen like you put cows in. Timothy had been playing with blocks. Then his throat had hurt, and then he’d been on the floor. 

When Timothy had come out of the episode he hadn’t woken up all the way. Instead, he’d floated in the half-solid haze that sometimes happened after one. He’d still been able to hear, and see, just not really think. He’d been laying on two chairs pushed together into the bench, with his mom’s coat draped over him and something else squishy-soft under his head. All the other kids were gone.  
Mom had been been standing near the door to the small room, talking to one of the ladies who’d ran the playgroup. She was shaking her head a whole bunch, her mouth all pinched. The church lady was shaking her head a lot, too, and holding up her hands.

When he'd sat up his mom came over to him immediately. He asked what was wrong and she didn’t answer, only said, quietly, “We're leaving.”

After they put their jackets on they’d left out the side door of the building. The other kids turned out to be in the park that was beside the church, all crawling over the wooden play structure cheerfully. Timothy had waved bye to them, and a couple of them waved back.

He and his mom had walked off the yellowing-green church’s lawn and never went onto it again. 

It’s a bit lonelier without a group of people to meet every weekend. He stops asking if they’ll still go for Christmas when his mom just keeps shaking her head.

 

_*_

 

  
Timothy is eight when he goes to the hospital.

 

The day before he was admitted, Timothy woke up shivering on the floor of his home and his mom is nowhere he can see, which scares him. He gets up and stumbles down the hallway to where he can see the light from the bathroom spilling out. He's trying to remember: he’d finished dinner, and then he'd seen one of his friends-that-weren't-his-friends, it'd been trying to talk to him but he hadn't wanted it to. And then... Timothy doesn't know what happened then. His head  _hurt._  
He wants his mom.  
The bathroom door is open a crack. Timothy steps up to it, and then stops.

He can see his mother through the crack in the door. She's sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her head in her hands and... drooping, like the trees outside did when it got too hot. He notices with a stab of fear in his stomach that her arm is  _bleeding._ “Mom?”  
She looks up at him and she'd been crying. Timothy feels horrible, but before he can say anything she sits up, sighs wobbly, and then opens her arms like she’d done when he was a little kid. “Come here.”  
He feels kind of like a little kid; small, scared. He pushes the door all the way open and runs to her. He doesn't even protest when she takes a hold of his legs and pulls him up properly onto her lap. She rocks the both of them back and forth a little even though  _she_ was the one who was crying, not him.   
Timothy feels his eyes start to fill up. He hates it when his mom cries. “I'm sorry,” he mumbles, trying not to let the tears start. His mom was upset and her arm's hurt and Timothy has a horrible, indescribable feeling it was his fault.  
“It's alright," she says, and she keeps saying it over and over. Until she says, “Timothy, honey... I think you need to go to see a doctor.”

He looks up at her through his messy hair. “I do,” he says, confused even through his tears. “We go to Doctor Emerson and Doctor Berger.” Doctor Emerson asked him about his friends-who-weren't-always-his-friends (he knew only little kids had imaginary friends, but his wouldn’t leave). Doctor Berger took his blood pressure and looked in his eyes and asked about his falls, and if they hurt his head. He likes her better out of the two of them. “I see them all the time.”  
“I know, but I think... I think you need a another doctor. A special one. One in a hospital.” His mother's arms gets tighter around him. She takes a deep breath. “And... you might have to stay there for a while. Just until you get better.”  
“How long would that take?” Timothy blurts.  
Mom wiped her eyes, then wiped some of Timothy's messy hair out of his eyes. “I don't know, baby, but you need help.”  
Timothy isn't a baby. He’s in  _third grade._ But he sure feels like a baby right then, scared and curled up in his mom's arms, and he doesn’t want to make her let him go.  
He doesn’t want to go to the hospital to see any new doctors either. But if his mom said it was the best thing for him then there was no hope for it. He'd have to.

  
They pack his stuff and get in the car the very next day. Timothy brings Peter the bear, his nightlight, his toothbrush, and his favourite shirt. He adds a lot more clothes when his mom tells him too. His bag is so full it starts to scare him a little. It doesn’t seem like he’ll ever come back.  
His mom lifts his backpack into the trunk of the car for him before they started the drive to the hospital.

  
Timothy's mother's name is Janet. As far as Timothy’s concerned it was the best name a mom could have.  When the nurse at the front desk of the hospital hands her a pen and a stack of papers that looked almost like a book, she flips through them and writes ‘Janet Wright’ over and over. Timothy had never seen her write her signature so many times before.  
Timothy had asked in the car what was going to happen when they got to the hospital. She’d said that she was really tired, and she’d kept making that awful sniffing noise that she did when she was really upset, so he had just dropped it.

Timothy hates that she looked upset and hates that she was going to  _leave_ him here and hates the smell of the hospital and how cold the floor feels under his shoes, and he wants to... to hit something, maybe. But he won't.  
Mom had said that if he gets better then the doctors would let him go home. She wouldn't lie to him.

  
When his mom’s done signing her name a couple of nurses and doctors appear in the nearby hallway to have a 'few words' with her in serious, particularly grown-up voices.

At the same time, one of the nurses walks over to Timothy and sits down with him on one of the flat chairs in the front waiting room. “I know this must feel very strange,” the nurse says, “But I need to ask you some questions. Okay? They’re going to be all about you, and you won’t get into trouble for how you answer any of them. Okay? Just be honest. It’s very important that you tell the truth.” She’s holding some papers and a red pen on her lap.  
Timothy is so nervous he couldn't stop rubbing his arms. He answers all the questions as best as he can.

 

When they’re done the nurse leaves, and his mom comes back from the aside and over to him immediately. She picks him right off the floor and hugs him incredibly tightly.  
This is it. She’s really leaving. Timothy squeezes her back; he's crying a little, but he doesn’t think anyone can tell. He feels cold all over.  
After a while his mom puts him down carefully, because she has to hand him his backpack and Peter. She smooths his hair down and kisses him on the forehead, smiling a little so he would smile back at her even though her eyes were all shiny and neither of them felt much like smiling. “Be brave,” she says.  
“I will,” Timothy promises.  He wants to say,  _when are you coming back?_  
But right then a nurse hurries over with a clipboard. “Timothy Wright?” She smiles down at him when he looks over, then gestures for him to follow her.  
Timothy’s mom nods down at him, too, so he has to go.  
  
He squeezes Peter as the nurse leads him down the hallway to a big set of doors. Before he went through them he looks over his shoulder.  His mom is standing at the end of the hallway, her hands up near her face, and then the doors swing shut and he can't see her anymore.  
  
*  
__  
  
Timothy is nine. He’s been in the hospital for a whole year, but he isn't better yet.

He has his own room, but he doesn’t really feel like it’s “his” room. Nothing in it is really his. The nurses took his bag as soon as he got into the door, way back when he first got admitted; he wasn’t sure why they told his Mom to make him bring one at all. He doesn’t wear his own clothes. They only give him his toothbrush right before light’s out. He has no idea where Peter is, and they keep the nightlight out of his room because it’s a fire hazard.  
  
He doesn’t spend a lot of time in his room, so it doesn’t bother him too much. There’s a lot of appointments to go to. Timothy has three doctors that see him all the time, and a couple that only saw him after he had ‘episodes’. A couple of them only talk to him, and a couple of them write notes to make him take medications.  
The episodes seem to be getting even worse, now.  
A lot of being at the hospital is medications. He only took one kind when he came here, but since then they’ve been putting him on more and more, and different kinds. Some of the pills are for the seizures, some of them are for whatever else they think is wrong with him other than the seizures, and some of them are for when it’s hard for him to sleep. Some of them make him sick, so the doctors pick different ones and try those. They’re always “trying” things.  
Timothy has trouble swallowing the medications. They’re either chalky or weirdly smooth, worse than the headache syrup his mom had given him, way harder to breathe around. After he has episodes the nurses give him blue pills that make him feel like he’s breathing through fog.  
Early on some of the other kids-- this whole part of the hospital is kids, mostly older than him-- show him how he can skip the blue pills, fake the nurses out, but then he’s not allowed to see the other kids anymore at all. (The nurses say he's too “unpredictable” to go be in the ward’s one-classroom school. He guessed that someone must’ve tattled. Or maybe he’d gotten overheard.)  
  
Timothy misses home.     
  
His mom visits him on the weekends during visiting hours. The first few times she explained as best as she could why she had brought him there and why he couldn’t go home with her when she left. It had taken her three weekends, because he'd kept tearing up and the orderlies that hung around the room had moved forward purposefully and said why don't they continue this another day, or they took Timothy away to 'get a drink' in a small room by himself until he calmed down.  
Timothy hates the drinking room. It’s dark and painted blue, the only spot to sit a soft hospital mattress on the floor. The orderlies give him water in a little paper cup with faded fish on it and that's why he's supposed to be in there, but really they just didn't want him upsetting everyone else. He hears them whispering to each other that they don't even know why  _this one_ is allowed to have visits. The blue walls seemed to crawl up each other and sometimes there’s the sharp hiss of one of his not-friends, the ones his doctors' said weren't real, in the corner. Timothy folded his legs up, trying to make himself less of a threat. He drinks the water because if he spills it on himself they won’t give him new clothes, and if he spills it on the floor he’ll get in trouble, but he can’t leave until it’s done.  
  
The third time his mother had visited and tried to explain why she’d left him there, for real, he'd worked hard on listening the whole way through without a single tear. It hadn’t been easy.  
“You're sick,” she’d said. “And it's a kind of sick where, you can't really get better from it, but you can a little. The doctor's are saying your new medication will help, but... you have to stay here until they can tell for sure what's wrong with you, so you can come home with me.” She was holding his hand in the way that it seemed to him all mothers' did, like it was the safest thing possible.  
It wasn't, obviously. Timothy had a sinking feeling in his stomach, because Mom said that the medication would help him get better but the pills he took weren't helping enough. Some of them made him want to puke all the time, or so thirsty his throat hurt. And he still had episodes, a lot of them. The doctors didn’t say anything to him but he heard them anyway, in the halls outside his room. They used words Timothy didn’t understand but sounded really bad—“disassociation”, “violent episodes”, “possible electrode therapy”. Timothy was pretty sure that if the medication by itself that they brought him was supposed to help it would’ve helped  _already._ But he didn't want to make Mom upset, so he didn’t ask again.  
  
After that visit they get a little better. Timothy doesn’t cry when she has to leave anymore. His mom starts bringing these little paperback books with her that they read together. They were about kids and aliens and a thing that let you change into something else if you concentrated hard enough.  
Timothy still has some problems focusing long enough to read, so he didn’t really trust books in general. But he likes reading those ones with his mom. They were cool, and it took away any question of what they'd talk about or her asking, “How are you today?” It’s a little easier going through the two hours when he doesn’t have to worry about explaining how he’s doing.  
  
Every time his mom left she would mark their place in the book with a pen cap, then get her stuff together and stand up. She’d smooth his hair down over his head, kiss his forehead and tell him to be brave.

He thinks of that, and of her voice telling him about Cassie and Jake and Marco and Rachel and Ax, during the long quiet hours at night. The warm thoughts don't keep the faces and noises back but it helps until they’re there.

 __  
*  
  
  
Tim is ten. Since he can’t see the other kids and doesn’t really talk to the nurses he doesn’t have anyone to tell him what day it is, and he doesn’t have his own calendar, so he can’t _really_ say what day it is most of the time, but he knows when it’s August 16th because he was allowed more dessert and the nurses are nicer than usual to him. Even in hospitals it’s good to have a birthday party, he guesses, even though extra dessert isn’t much of a party. So he’s ten.  
If he was still in real school he’d be in fifth grade by now.  
He’s decided that he wants to be called 'Tim'. Just Tim. The thing is, 'Timothy' sounds like a little kid's name, and he’s patently not a little kid anymore.   
He tells his mom that when she comes in to see him on the next visiting day after his birthday. She only blinks a couple times before nodding. She says, “Alright. Whatever makes you happy.”  
It's a little hard to think through the fog the medication gives him, but Tim is glad she didn't get upset. He'd been worried. She’d been the one to give him his name, after all, and it wasn’t that he didn’t like it or anything, it just… well.    
He hugs her extra hard when she has to leave at the end of the visit. Nurses watch them closely from the nearby table.  
She hugs him back and holds his bandaged fingers carefully when he clutches at her hand before he can stop himself. Then, as always, she kisses his forehead goodbye again and pulls away.

  
That night Tim has another episode and breaks out of the ward. He wakes up days later, strapped to his bed, his head so full of lava he's sure he'll turn his neck the wrong way and drown. All he can smell is rot and burning. His mouth feels stuffed with bloody dirt. He can’t tell if he’s screaming or not. The tall man watches him, silent as the dark, from the corner beside the door.

Tim isn't allowed out of his room alone for two and a half months.  
  
  
*

  
Long miserable nights merge into long less-miserable nights in tiny stages, like ants crawling forward. Tim almost doesn't notice it, it's so slow. It's  _hard._  
  
Eventually, though, Tim is eleven, and the doctor's say he's stabilizing.  
Not better, not yet. But getting there.

 _Stabilizing._ The word reminds him of the life support in Ax's dome when the Andalite had been let go of the main ship and plunged into the ocean through the firey atmosphere. He doesn't tell the doctors that. He's learned to talk less, now. His brain’s like a lawn that had been raked through by so many doctors and counsellors and medications and IV-drips that he couldn't count all of them, but it was finally starting to look almost smooth. Or so he heard.  
Tim could measure hours by the doses and the meals, but outside that time feels wavery and indistinct, like the view through the double-frosted safety glass windows. He isn't sure how long it’s been since he had an episode. He knows he doesn't wake much up during the night, except to go to the bathroom. The medications don’t tire him out so much and do help with his seizures. Nurses didn't speak in such hushed voices around him anymore. Something must be working.

  
Still, he’s angry all the time pretty much. After he had been gone for days the hospital had dropped his allowed visiting times to once per month. Tim had nearly shouted at them when they'd told him that; he hadn't meant to run away, it wasn't  _fair,_ and especially it wasn't fair to his mom. Didn't they know she had to work almost every day? He doesn't blame her when long stretches of time go by without her coming in, after that.  
Well. Mostly he doesn't blame her. There's a part of him that does, and he feels like crap about it.  
Even after they let him out into the ward again, and after they finally allow him in the hospital’s in-house class with the other kids who whisper behind their hands when they see him, Tim’s angry.  
He wonders if he'll ever not feel this way. At himself. At the people who work in the hospital-- he knows it was him being sick that made him run away and not remember anything, and the counselors said they were keeping him inside for his own safety, but now the day nurse says he's “old enough not to have an incident” like it's how old he is that affects the menacing specters that stretch out of shadows towards him. Like seizures are his fault. He kind of hates the nurse for that, and the hospital in general for how long he’s been trapped inside it. The worst part by far though is being angry at his mom.  
Tim doesn’t say anything about how he feels, because otherwise they’ll take the “school privileges” away and he’d be all alone. He needs them to think he’s getting better.  
  
It works, sort of. They give him back visiting privileges. _Finally._  
The first visiting hour he’s allowed to see his mom again she’s one of the first few people walking through the visiting room door.  
He’d been stood nervously away in the corner. He feels weird and out of place, even though he’s only ever belonged there—he’s started growing more, the jeans that someone donated to the hospital are starting to get short on his ankles, and he trips on air a lot. It scares him to not be able to run. Not being able to hide in the loose clothes. He doesn’t like feeling seen.  
But he even crosses in front of the window to go to his mom.    
She’s paler than he remembers and skinnier and it’s awful. He's so glad to see her.  
His mom’s glad to see him, too. She hugs him so hard he thinks his ribs might crack and explode everywhere, leaving the whole place dripping--- not that he'd want that to happen; he'd never make his mom scared like that. It’s good beyond belief to have someone he knows hug him, instead of the impersonal check-ups or stern shoulder-grabbing of the hospital staff that Tim had learned just barely not to flinch from.  
Crying was a stupid thing to do but Tim cries a little anyway, leaving a dark patch on his mom's jacket’s sleeve. She doesn’t seem to care.  
They read books together until every single other parent has left and his mom's voice has gotten scratchy. When she has to leave she gets to her feet and hugs him bone-breakingly again, for eons, and then kisses him on the forehead and promised to see him again next week.

Next  _week._ He hasn’t seen her for months before. He nods, and promises he’ll be here. She laughs a little, the kind of laugh that had tears hiding under it, even though Tim wasn’t joking. He does promise.  
It’s really nice to hear her laugh again.  
If Tim wipes more tears away on his sleeve in the bathroom after she left, no one can say a thing.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Then Tim is twelve, and abruptly, miraculously, he's  _free._  
  
The squadron of doctors that had been assigned to digging through his wrecked brain has gotten fewer until he'd only been talking to one. He’s allowed regular clothes to wear daily, instead of the scrubs they gave him to wear when he was suspected of having an episode. He hasn't had one in a long time. The hospital staff never have to lock him in his room anymore. Even the medication isn't so bad. He feels... levelled out. Grounded. Like a parking lot paved over.  
  
One day Doctor Lipnowski calls Tim into his office. He's checking through a file that must be Tim's when Tim walks in. The doctor gets him to sit down and they talk for a little while. Or, really, the doctor talks at him for a little while.  
“You've been here a long time,” Lipnowski says when he finally gets to the point. “But given how well you're doing, you might be moved to an outpatient facility.”  
The words hang in the air.  
“What?” Tim swallows, his throat sharp and crackly with the urge to cough.  
The doctor looks up, adjusting the thin brown glasses a lot of doctors' seem to have. “That means you'd be let go,” he says, “Not without care, of course, you'd need to check in weekly. Daily, at first. But you'd be able to move back in with your family. We're even thinking of moving you next week.”

Tim doesn't say anything. He sits back in the squishy but not comfortable chair, not believing it. This wasn't the first time that discharge plans had been made. They'd say next week, and then it'd be pushed back and pushed back again, or he'd have another episode and get put on lockdown. It was useless to hope.

  
But a visit from his mom passes, and nothing happens. No one locks him in his room; no one calls him into the office again.  
  
  
Finally two nurses wake him up and make him pack up what was actually his in ‘his’ room into the tattered Spiderman backpack he'd brought when he was eight, and then they make him stand at the desk by the outside doors, and it doesn't seem real.  
Even when his mother walks in, looking tired but happy to see him, he still doesn't feel like it makes sense. It's been such a long time since he's believed he'd ever live anywhere else. His world had shrunk to the hospital, and the dangerous places outside it. He didn't know if he  _could_  leave, if he'd be stuck here for all time like a ghost in a haunted house.  
After he and his mom hug, Tim sits in a small room with a nurse, going over all of his stuff on a checklist.  Just outside the room a doctor details to his mother how possibly-violent and unmanageable he’s likely to be.  
Tim knows he shouldn’t eavesdrop, but it’s hard not to when they were seriously right outside the door. It only ends up making him angrier, anyway. Tim hides his arms inside his too-big donated coat and makes fists so he won't bite his nails, or yell at the nurse, or start yelling for his mom to just take him away  _now._ He’s so done with them telling him how probably dangerous he was going to be.  
“Timothy?”  
Tim looks over. The nurse, having finished her checklist, hands him back his eight-year-old self's stuffed bear and old nightlight.  
They'd gotten confiscated from him. He can't remember why, but it had been a long time ago, long enough that the doctors had still been juggling medications and talk therapy and the idea of night restraints. The bear and nightlight look like alien sculptures to him now. He hides them both in his backpack, shame settling in his stomach for reasons he doesn't know.

Then his mom comes back into the room, along with Doctor Lipnowski. He makes Tim stand up and shake his hand. Tim smiles because he feels like he’d get questioned if he doesn’t. The nurse standing behind Lipnowski, the one from the reception desk, smiles back at him.  
  
Then they tell him and his mom to leave. __  
  
Just like that.

 

The drive back home is weird. None of the light sits right. The radio said it was July, but all the colours on the trees seemed washed out and no one was outside except their car. A sudden spike of worry slams into Tim’s gut when he wonders if his mom had moved, or given all his stuff away, or told everyone that she doesn’t have a son and the kid that all the neighbours remember was just a, a clone or something. Not a real kid at all. Tim swallows, trying not to make his mom stop the car or turn it around. He breathes slowly through his nose.          
They arrive at their apartment building, and it’s the same one that Tim had pulled up an image of in his head whenever he thought of home, but it seems out of place. The red-brown of the brick seems faded like the trees. It’s an old building, built long and rectangular and low to the ground, only two stories—the hospital had had four, with him and the other kids in the locked ward on the first— and windows looking out like glazed eyes. Tim and his mom’s apartment was on the far right, second floor. Tim can recognize it even from the street. His mom had hung chimes in the window to catch the light from the afternoon sun when Tim was like, seven. They still glittered there.  
  
The two of them go into the lobby and up the stairwell without speaking, their footfalls making slightly off-pattern rings on the carpeted steps. He’s tired when he makes it up the steps, winded, but he doesn’t say anything about it.

His mom unlocks their apartment’s door without any ceremony, but she does pause and step aside to let him through first.    
Inside it sounds like dust. The layout is the same: small entryway, living room on right, slightly grimy sliding windows leading out to a thin concrete 'patio' on the back wall of the living room, dining table farther back on the right, small kitchen directly to the left of the table, the hallway leading to the bathroom and Tim's room and his mother's room on the left in front of the kitchen. The TV, thin carpet, and small secondhand coffee table in front of the midsized secondhand couch are the same as they were when he left too.  
In the moment of silence after Tim steps inside, he realizes he’d thought his mom might have gotten a dog or something in the years he’d been away but there’s nothing and no one there. It’d just been her. Unexpectedly, that makes him feel worse.  
Mom closes the door gently behind herself and then locks it, flipping the deadbolt just in case. She takes off her coat and shoes without looking at him. “… your bedroom’s the door on the right,” she says quietly, like she wasn’t sure what else to say.  
He wants to tell her he wasn’t going to shatter if there was too much noise, but the dust keeps pressing on his ears. Tim feels like he should be quiet, too. “I know,” he says back, a couple notches lower than he’d normally talk.  
She looks at him for a moment before smiling a hesitant, watery kind of smile. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.”  
  
Tim nods at her and then, having nothing else to do, he hangs his jacket over his arm and goes down the hallway to the door on the right.

His old bedroom, which is  _his bedroom,_ feels even more surreal than driving away from the hospital. He has his own bed with thick blue blankets and his own bookshelves and lamp and outlets that weren't encased in crazy-proof locks and everything. It looks like nothing was even moved since the last morning he was here. The window is open.  
Tim sets his backpack on his comforter but can’t sit down. There’s all these things that he recognizes, that belong to him, but he doesn’t feel like he belongs here. He feels like a paper cutout, a comic book character stuck onto a— a National Geographic magazine.

  
The only halfway believable thing about the whole day happens later, when his mom puts a couple pill bottles on the bathroom counter beside Tim while he’s brushing his teeth and then sort of waits in the doorway without saying anything.  
He finishes rinsing the toothpaste out and then, mechanically, downs the appropriate number of pills. After four years it’s become a habit. He catches tapwater in his hand to wash them down. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see his mom relax a little. The night nurses had done that too when he’d stopped fighting them about taking his doses.  


His medication knocks him out for a while. They always do.

Tim has a nightmare. He always does.

But this time—this time, when he wakes up shivering on the floor, his mom is there. Helping him sit up, holding his hand.

 

//


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 9/11 section in this chapter, plus an uptick of violence. Please be aware.
> 
> ////

Tim is thirteen and nothing is ever easy.

Getting back into regular life was as blinding and disorienting as walking from a cave into sharp sunlight. Tim couldn't blink the spots out of his eyes. School is like walking on eggshells with shards of glass on all sides and the glass could laugh at him.

Math is _still_ hard. None of the books in English class made sense. He can't tell if it was because he still has the “barriers” that the guidance councillor talked about, even though his mom had gotten him new glasses again, or if it’s because he really is just dumber than a brick like the other kids said.

Tim hates the other kids. He hates their gloating over their new clothes, their casual touching each other like the hallways are a dark movie theatre, and how they’ve all known each other forever so he’s always left out; he hates the way they grab each other’s shoulders and point at him, and the stupid faces they make exaggeratedly kissing the air whenever angry tears start welling up at the corner of his traitorous eyes.  
He hates the names they call him. One of them is in the office when Tim’s having a bad day, and they hear him making a phone call to his mom. That afternoon they all hiss the words “mama's boy” at him when the teachers can’t hear.  
Tim wants to snap at them that they don't get it. They all got to see their mom's every day their whole lives. They'd never hurt their mom by accident, they’d never been  _kept away._   Why wouldn't he care what she thought, after that? Why wouldn't he want to spend time with her?  
And they were wrong about the whole reason he'd been in the office, anyway. It wasn’t like he was some kind of baby who missed his mom so much he couldn’t stand to be away from her for six hours. He'd been calling her to ask about his medications, which the teacher’s had run out of stock of.  
Somehow the other kids hadn’t heard that part. It was a small mercy, and the fact that he had to consider it a mercy at all made resentment flare behind Tim’s eyes, but he hoarded it anyway. They were wrong.

They don't stop teasing him, wrong or not. Tim knows that they're just trying to rile him up so he’ll get upset. He wonders if they’ll stop if he fights them. He doesn’t think so. Besides, the guidance councillor at the school has a copy of his medical records, and Tim still remembers the loaded mumble that the doctors had passed back and forth over his head for four years.  _Violent episodes._ He couldn’t get into fights, or the teachers would think he was really sick again and they’d get him sent back.  
He defaults to hiding in the bathroom, downing his medication at the right times with hands that only tremble a little.

When he can't do that, he ignores them as much as possible; he focuses on his homework. Stupid or not, he needs to try.  
His teacher’s know about his issues, and most of them were nice enough about it. Mostly. He still feels weird—exposed and ashamed and  _angry_ —when one of them asks him nicely if he was “doing better” one week, or offers to walk him to the office at lunch like he needs constant supervision. He isn’t a psychopath, he's out of the hospital, he shouldn’t need people  _watching him_ like he was a little kid. His mandatory group therapy already did that. He certainly didn’t need it twice.

Tim couldn’t say any of this. The words get all stuck in his throat.

  
  
*****

  
  
Tim is fourteen and it only gets harder.

 

A week into the beginning of the school year, the towers in New York fall. Everyone’s let out of school early. The teachers all just tell them to go home. No one says why. The other kids say all sorts of things, whispering to each other in the hallways, but none of them  _really_ knew. Unsure what to do, everyone actually does go home.  
  
Outside it seems like the air’s buzzing from something more than flies and the heat. There aren’t any clouds in the whole sky. With the unspoken fear hovering around them, herd instinct kicks in: everyone from Tim’s school travels in packs down the roads. Tim walks with a bunch of kids who live in his general direction. It’s the first time he can remember not walking home by himself. He wasn’t friends with any of them but they were all in the same grade, so they accept him in their ranks long enough to get to the safety of their houses.  
He splits off from the group at the start of the walk up to his building. A couple of them nod to him as he leaves. Tim might have appreciated the recognition on any other day. 

The unsettled feeling continues inside his building. It's like the ‘after’ scene in a horror movie; not silence, but the absence of expected noise. Most of the apartment’s doors were open on the first floor, wailing from TVs and radios echoing from every direction. Tim stared for a minute from the stairwell and then kept walking as fast as he could.  
  
On his floor it's the same thing, except along with the noise there were people. People he doesn’t even recognize. They stand in small groups all along the hallway, talking in low voices. Tim can hear someone crying.  
Everyone looks up when he shuts the door to the stairwell and stands there, not knowing what to do. A couple of them nod at him. One person, a lady with silver hair, gets up and calls something into Tim and his mom’s apartment’s door.  
A second later his mom appears in the hallway. The lights in their hallway were regularly kind of dark, way faded when they weren’t straight-up broken, but with everyone’s door open the light spills through and Tim can see that his mom’s eyes are lined with red. She’d been crying.  
Confused and inexplicably guilty, eight years old again, he runs to her. She holds him the second he’s within reach of her arms, awkwardly reaching around his backpack to keep him close. They cling to each other in the hallway, the murmuring going on around them increasing again as people continued whatever they were talking about.  
“What happened?” Tim manages, looking up at the side of his mom’s face. He’s almost as tall as her, now, which had felt bizarre.  
His mom closed her eyes like she’d been overwhelmed from two words. She doesn’t say anything.  
  
  
*  
  
  
It felt, at the time, like nothing would’ve made it past that. Everything would’ve frozen and descended into static like the TVs showing the same loop over and over.

But by January the seismic disturbance that was The Disaster has faded into background noise for Tim. No one he knew personally was hurt. School doesn’t let them talk about it much, and even if they did, there’s not really anything to say.  
He has his own problems to deal with. Three thousand deaths in New York didn’t make them stop. One of the only differences, for him, is that burning towers now factor into his nightmares.  
  
He still isn't adjusting to school well, according to everyone. Tim decides he really hates the word “adjusting”. The guidance councillor says that that’s part of the problem, he’s too obstinate. Tim very, very closely almost tells them to go to hell. His head aches. None of them understand anything he tells them. He stops bothering to talk to people very much. He stops listening.  
  
So he’s angry all the time, still doesn’t have any real friends, he’s ignoring the teachers, and his mom isn't understanding any of it. She keeps telling him to try and he is trying but he can’t say that the right way.  
It just ends up like his mom going, “I know it’s difficult, you need to keep trying.”  
And him saying, “Oh try what, Mom? Being  _brave_ again?”  
And it just gets worse. They shout, because Tim  _being brave_ would not have actually helped anything that had happened to him and he wanted her to know that; and Janet wanted her son to know that she'd been basically powerless outside of the hospital and even  _in_ the hospital but she'd needed to give him something and what did he expect her to say? What else  _could she have said_?

Tim would have wanted to hear that she would come back.  
And she’d say, “Of course I’d come back! I  _did,_ you-- you’re here now, Tim. Nowhere else.”  
And Tim would say, “I know,” because he was exhausted of the argument.  _I know,_ but he'd never quite believe it because some part of him was always stuck in maintenance tunnels in the dark with someone no one else could see whispering to him to be quiet, be still, and something else no one could see chasing--  
but still he was  _here,_ so what else was there to say.

And, yes. He’s still here.

 

He’s restless. The other kids notice, call him “Twitchy” in class like it’s his name.

 

In the middle of the end-of-term exams he yells at one of his teachers. He’s one of the last kids in the chairs at the end of the two hours and the teacher bothers him that it’s time to leave. He doesn’t say anything bad, just loud, letting off some steam. If Tim was any other kid they might’ve just waved it off as exam stress. Bad for him, he’s the kid who’d spent four years in the psych ward.  _Violent episodes._  
The teachers have a hushed meeting at the edge of the room while he sits in the office, and when they come in they’re unified with serious faces. One of them—Ms. Lupine, the guidance counsellor—has an apologetic sort of expression. The others don’t. They all agree he needs to see a therapist or he can’t stay in school. Group therapy has been downgraded to twice every two weeks at sporadic intervals, so the school rules that it doesn’t count.  
They call his mom in, and she listens with tight lips before nodding.  
It takes them a while to find a therapist that works with his mom’s job insurance but eventually they do. So it’s January, and he’s back under the doctor’s magnifying glass. Two mandatory appointments a week.  
Tim has to go to them and he has to “co-operate”, but that doesn’t mean he has to take it seriously. He doesn’t learn his new therapist’s name for the first three months out of spite.  
 

He gets into fights with the other kids after school, the kind of fight that's far enough away on the meticulously cut football field that no one could see it from the building. It’s not like anybody would tell the teachers, anyway.  
He wins a couple of them. Tim's pretty strong when he wants to be. It’s a mixed blessing, the kind that isn’t actually a blessing at all, but word gets around. The other kids start giving him a wider berth. They toss their insults from an arms-length away instead of with shoves and body-checks.  
He doesn’t tell his mom. Obviously. But it’s hard to hide, and sometimes when he trudges home late the evidence is written out on his arms or streaming steadily from his nose. He  lies about it. Oh, he just tripped on a root or a sidewalk crack on the way back. Just being regular stupid, shaky, clumsy Tim Wright.  
She twists her mouth like she does when she’s unsure about something, gives him a cloth ran under warm water and some witch hazel for his bruises, then hovers over him for a couple minutes, not sure what to say.  
Tim hears her talking to his aunt about him, later. Mom puts her on speakerphone while she cleans up the mess of paperwork that’d slowly been eating up space on the kitchen table.  
His mom says, “He's coming home with them so often, but he never says anything-- I can’t figure what to do.”  
Aunt Charlotte says, “He’s just being a boy, don’t worry too much about it. Mine were the same way before they went to college. It’s completely normal for his age.”  
And his mom is quiet for a second before hesitantly saying, “You’re probably right.”

Tim paces tight circles in his room before dropping his pillow on the floor specifically so he can kick it, viciously, at the wall. Of course he feels shitty about the only thing in his life that’s  _normal.  
_

  
Tim’s fourteen and a half, and once or twice he runs away-- only for the afternoon, when he couldn’t take school any additional second. As awful as school was, though, it’s even more nervewracking to be somewhere on his own, and he doesn’t have any money to run away for good. He eventually slinks back home with shame burning up his back.

No matter that it’s only been a few hours, his mom’s always frantic. There’s yelling.

“Why would you do this!?”  
“I don’t know, I just needed some time--”  
“You don’t  _know_?”  
“It’s been a hard day, okay!”  
“That doesn’t mean you disappear for hours! Goddamnit, Timothy, are you  _trying_ to get them to take you away again!?”  
“ _No_!” Fear like freezing claws around his throat. He couldn’t go back there.  
“Well that’s what’s going to happen if they find you alone in the woods again!”  
“I wasn’t in the f-- I wasn’t in the woods! I was at the, the Dairy Queen off Elm street, I just needed some quiet.”  
“Then why didn’t you tell me?” Always the worst part, because she says it and her eyes get like moons and her normally slightly-hoarse voice is wobbly. “I don’t know where you are, for  _hours,_ and I think if you’ve— honey, if you ever stumbled into the river, or if you ever hurt someone--”  
“I won’t hurt anybody,” Tim insists, a different kind of terror welling up. “Mom, I’d never--”  
“I know you’d never mean to,” she said. “I know.”  
And there it is:  _mean to,_ no, but he still might. During an episode he didn’t  _mean to_ do anything, but things still happened. Tim feels sick different from his regular kind of sick.  
“You could’ve  _drowned,_ ” his mom presses. She covers her eyes with her hands, then looks up, still upset. “You can’t do that again, Tim. You can’t. Please don’t.”  
“... I’m sorry,” Tim mutters. He scrunches his shoulders and folds his arms across his chest, clutching onto his elbows like holding onto corners would keep him together.

After long moments, his mom sighs. “If you need some time by yourself, wait for class change and go outside,” she adds quietly. “Get some air. Cool your head. And talk to Doctor Scott about it, okay?”  
No way he was going to talk to his therapist about skipping. Outside was just as bad as inside, Tim wants to say, there were still people out there; and the sight of all of the trees moving in the wind gave him a headache. But there’s no way to put that that didn’t sound…  _crazy,_ so he just nods.  
 

The next day he buys a pack of cigarettes from a band kid. He buys them for a lot of reasons, not least because they give him something to do with his hands. He doesn’t tell the therapist about it. He hides the pack under his bed at home, way in the corner where he’s almost scared to look on bad days. They’d be safe there. He could grab them before school and just stuff them in his pocket.

Obviously he knows he shouldn’t smoke, but he’s going to fucking die anyway. Sooner rather than later, probably. Tim closes his eyes when his hands shake.   
The next time he feels like he’s going to shatter from fine lines all around his seams, he does go outside but not for the reason his mom intended.  
Tim has a second of mind-numbing self-loathing when he realises that he didn’t bring any way to actually light up his smokes. But, thankfully, one of the more pleasant stoner kids meanders over and offers him a match. Tim trades her a quarter for it, saying “thanks” as she goes back to her group where they’re sitting by the concrete benches under the spruce trees. Her smile was glassy as she nodded.  
Smoking counteracts the jittery anxiousness with nicotine, or helps relieve stress, or something. Tim isn't sure how it actually works, but it feels a little better so he’ll take it.

 

Everything isn't always terrible. Mom works long days, but she brings home curry or Taco Bell every so often. They’re Tim’s favourites and also way more convenient than cooking. His mom and Tim eat together in the living room on the sofa, watching soap operas or reruns of Star Wars. On some weekends they spend time together playing cards or figuring out newspaper mazes. It's nice.  
Even when they're fighting, it could be worse. For everything that Tim hurls at her about the last five years of his life, she never tells him to get over it or that he's making it up.  It’s a small thing, but it’s a mercy.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
When Tim is fifteen his mom gets him a cheap acoustic guitar for his birthday. Equally a gift, though less obvious, is her understanding of  _space._ She doesn't ask him every single afternoon how school’s going anymore, and she stops peppering him about friends or weekend plans.  
Tim likes the guitar. He practices some songs to show her. As his own gift—or, really, as a compromise-- he practices out on the couch in the living room instead of sitting on his bed. The therapist he still has to see had talked to him about not isolating himself, before school had let out for the summer. Tim tries.  
His mom likes the songs he picks. She actually digs out _her_  old guitar out of the Everything Closet in back of her room, along with a flute and an ancient keyboard.  
“I remember that,” Tim says, staring at it.  
His mom laughs. “Yeah, you’d play it with me when you were little.” She plugs in the old thing, wipes a bunch of dust bunnies off with her palm and then plays the first couple bars of ‘Silent Night’.  
Abruptly, Tim's surrounded by memories of the sight and smell of the kid's room in their old church, the hushed sounds of the adults going through Christmas mass outside the thin walls. They'd left because of him. Guilt creeps up his back and settles across his shoulders, but he ignores it the best he can. He can't change anything now.  
They make a habit of practicing old rock songs together, when they both have enough energy and time.

  
The relative peace that they’d built is interrupted in October.  
Tim hasn’t skipped school the whole semester, so far. Smoking helps the stress. After he’d ran out of birthday money (courtesy of his aunt and grandparents) he’d kept up his nicotine supply by trading answers on music tests for cigarettes. He's pretty good in music. The other orchestra-band kids knew their music as well as him, or better, but there’d always be those few that just didn’t feel like doing the work, and Tim is right there offering. It's a kind of relationship, like they learn about in biology. Symbiotic.  
He’d still been hiding the cigarettes under his bed, way back in the corner, but apparently not well enough.  
He comes home and immediately sees his mom sitting at the small kitchen table with her arms crossed. It’s almost six o’clock; Tim knows she should be at her shift by now. Unease settles into the back of his head. As soon he closes the front door she starts talking.  
She says, “I was cleaning this morning, there’s too much dust, it’s a miracle we’ve been breathing. I was going to wait until you got home but then I thought, your concert band runs late, I’d better do it now. So I swept out your room.”  
_Shit,_ Tim thinks. He stands awkwardly in the doorway, one hand on the strap of his backpack.  
His mom looks at him. She motions to the crumpled pack of Marlboros in front of her on the table. She says, “What the hell are these, Timothy?”  
“My cigarettes,” he replies, trying to go for a 'not mocking just honest' voice and not sure if he manages it.  
  
He thinks she’s going to yell at him again. She nods a couple times, breathing very intentionally, like she’s literally building up steam.  
But then she just stands up and goes to work without another word. It takes Tim a second to realize she’d taken the cigarettes with her.

  
They both seethe separately for about two days until Tim has a bad day. He skips a few classes at school, pacing back and forth across the field with the express purpose of wasting time.  
He comes home late, to find his mother clutching the phone with her face twisted up like a thunderstorm.  
Tim drops his bag on the living room foot-table with a defiant  _thud,_ back tensed up for a fight.  
  
Again, a surprise: instead of yelling she just turns and walks back through the living room, out to the three-by-two-foot balcony. She looks like a shadow as she leans back against the part of the glass door that doesn't slide sideways.

Unnerved but still angry, Tim follows her out.

 

It’s weirdly cold outside. Mom looks tired, still in her work uniform except for her shoes, still holding the house phone.  
He’s getting bad grades, maybe. The school calls about that sort of thing. They also call about truancy. Tim hadn’t really thought about it when he’d ditched that afternoon. He has, he realizes as his stomach sinks, not really been thinking about anything except escape. Mom’s probably pissed off and disappointed in him, and is just—freezing him out, or something—  
“Are you taking drugs, Tim?” His mom asks bluntly, looking over at him from where she’s leaning.  
Tim recoils, the guilt vanishing. “ _Yeah_ ,” he replies, bitterly. “Like four of them, I have been for years. You know, after you left me at the hospital. Why?” A spark of rage catches in the simmer in his stomach. “Were you thinking I’d just been--”  
“Do these help?” She interrupts his rising voice. The pack of cigarettes he’d bought from the band kid are in her left hand, and she’s holding them up.  
“What?” He asks, offbalance.  
“Do these help,” she repeats. She offers the pack to him, holding it steadily. “If they do, just take them, Tim.”  
He stares at her. Angry tears stung at his eyes. “You’re—you’re just trying to trick me because you think I’m stupid and I’m not going to do anything important.”  
“What?” His mom looks confused, then sad. She shakes her head. “I don’t think you’re stupid, honey. Not at all. You have learning problems--”  
“That’s just the same!” Tim says, loudly. He crosses his arms and determinedly blinks away the stinging.  
They both stand there for a minute, facing each other. His mom is blinking a lot now too, keeping her hand over her mouth.  
She take a deep breath. Then she says, finally, “The most important thing you can do in your life is try to help people. Okay?” His mom pauses. “I know none of this is easy, Tim, I know. I’m sorry. I could—I could be more help to you, spend more time--” She shakes her head. “But this is how our life is. And if smoking helps you deal with, with everything, it’s fine.”  
“It’s not fine!"  
“No, but it’s better than other things.” She’s still holding out the cigarettes.  
  
  
Tim finally takes them, feeling the weight of the pack. He looks at the cigarettes so he won’t have to look at his mom, who’s taking enough deep breaths to be hiding something with them. Tim doesn’t want to see her cry. He scrubs at his own eyes, wishing his bangs were long enough to cover them. It’s a long moment where they’re both just standing there under the upstairs neighbour’s patio, and it’d be more fitting if it was raining or something, but it’s just humid and cold. The weather would start to get serious soon.

  
After he got himself all drained, Tim looked up again to find his mom staring at the ground, too. He puts his cigarettes in his pocket and then goes to stand next to her. He doesn’t lean into her like a little kid curling up for a hug, but he doesn’t pull away when she puts her arm around his shoulders and squeezes, either.  
“Please don’t hide stuff from me,” she says after a minute of hugging, her voice thick. “You need to tell me if something’s wrong. I need to know to be able to help you. I promise to give you more space, if that’s what you need. But you need to promise to _talk_  about this stuff.” Her voice is hoarse from the smoking and the emotions, and earnest. She pauses like she’s waiting.  
Tim feels awful. Clinging to the corner of that awfulness is something like hope. He hates fighting with his mom, hates keeping stuff bottled up. It’s weird to be able to think of doing anything else. “Yeah,” he mumbles.  
He feels his mom nod, and then she kisses the side of his head like he’s still a little kid. She keeps her arm on his shoulder. It’s nice.  
_Momma’s boy,_ a bunch of jerk eight-graders chant in the back of Tim’s head. Tim grits his teeth against them, pushing the memory back. He leans his head on his mom’s shoulder. They stand like that for a long while.

  
  
*  
  
  
Tim is sixteen and taking a driver’s test. It’s a school-sponsored thing. The way it works is that he doesn’t have to pay for lessons and his high school can have their students making out in vehicles instead of on the building’s lawn at lunch.  
He sixteen and  _failing_  a driver’s test, because he lost his temper at the instructor when the man had made snide remarks about Tim's grades and haircut and 'upbringing'. 

He’s still sixteen in the middle of summer when he takes the drivers' test again. He gets a different instructor, and the practical went well but he completely blanked on the written and failed again.  
He kicks a dumpster on his way out of the auto-insurance building and smokes five cigarettes on his walk home.  
He needs a job—or, he  _wants_ a job, and he’d need one soon enough so he might as well get started now that he’s finally legal to have one—but the public transportation in town is kind of horrible, and he can only walk so far. He needs to be able to drive.

Tim remembers that he used to be able to walk farther at once, but his lungs have been bothering him lately. He’s been coughing more. But it’s not _that_ , it’s just allergies or something. It’s a side-effect of the smoking habit he’s been taking up like it’s his personal duty.  
His mom’s been looking at him with concern in her eyes but she’s been giving him space, like she had promised months ago, and Tim is grateful for it. There’s a short list of things he can handle right now and her concern, plus feeling bad when he inevitably does something that increases her concern, are not on it.  
  
He gets his medication refills from a local pharmacy in an unmarked brown bag. They’ve started tasting more bitter than before. He convinces himself he’s only imagining it. “Being more crazy than usual” is also not on the list of what he can handle right now.

  
  
*

  
  
Tim is seventeen, employed at a shitty job with shittier income, but it’s a block away from his house so it’s good enough. He saves up for whatever will come next.  
  
All the other kids in his class have their beginner licenses, if not moderates. Tim feels like the weird odd one out, again. The therapist Tim still has to see keeps telling him not to measure his own life by other people’s lives, but what is he supposed to do? No one judges themselves on their own merits, not really.  
Dr. Scott tells him he’s being cynical. He suggests Tim do mind exercises. If Tim just thinks hard enough, he’ll stop feeling so dejected and alone. Sure.  
Tim doesn’t bring it up anymore, and lies when Scott asks him follow-up questions.

 

It’s December and Tim decides tries the driver’s test again.

And one more time. He shaves first, to see if that affects his luck at all.

 

It’s January, and he finally,  _finally_ he gets his license. He tells everyone he knows.  
Scott says he’s glad that Tim got a sense of accomplishment from the exercise. Tim doesn’t care about him. The important part is Tim’s mom’s smile like a kilowatt light, and her huge hug when he gets home with the certificate in his fist. It makes a happy hum in Tim’s chest that wells up into his face so he’s actually smiling. (It makes him cry, too, of course; too strong of a reaction, but he doesn’t even care.)

Mom lets him borrow her car on weekends when she didn't work and after his shift at the gas station ends. He pays for the gas he uses. He doesn’t have friends to take out to the movies, can’t drink, and doesn’t have a crush or the wherewithal to ask anyone on get-to-know-dates, so he drives alone. It’s a good feeling most of the time.  
Tim sometimes makes trips to buy books or go to unfamiliar antique shops and check out the old photo albums people left behind in their dusty shelving units. Mostly he only drives to drive. He loops around town and back, looking at the mountains. They settle a feeling into his stomach. It's not peace, but it's something. An itching where his fingers meet the steering wheel. Plans unfolding like pages over each other in his head, all a little too blurry for him to see just yet, but still there. Hopeful.  
At his guidance councillors insistence, he’d applied to a nearby college a couple months back. At that point the idea of college had felt so far out of reality it’d been like he was writing a application to fly in a spaceship. It still doesn’t feel real but the fact of the mountains around the city means that time, in general, keeps passing. School is ending, and he’s almost done. Tim has enough credits. He’ll make it out alive.

He can’t believe it, and he believes in it so hard his head doesn’t have room for anything else.

 

*

 

Tim is almost eighteen and eavesdropping from his room while his mom has a loud argument over the phone in the kitchen. She’s calling out her boss for giving her hours on Tim’s graduation day when she’d specifically requested it off, and had been granted the free day, the month before.  
  
It'd been a bad weekend for Tim. He'd gone on the mandatory Grad Field Trip out to the woods' to admire nature or whatever. It’d been awful, and he'd come back with a cold deep in his chest and his brain. The next two days he spent coughing fit to burst, staying in his room so he didn't get Mom sick, facing away from the window and wanting to do  _something_ but instead just laying there, feeling blank, like curling up on the carpet until he disappeared entirely.  
He didn't, obviously.  
But now he's angry again: at himself, at the school's stupid scheduling, at his mom's stupid boss-- and at Mom a little too because he isn't worth making such a fuss over. The graduation is going to be one hour in a stupid robe and a stupid hat. He doesn't want any pictures or flowers, he just wants school over with. He doesn’t need a celebration.  
But she's fighting for him, again, and he can't tell her to stop doing that, because she’d think he was talking down on himself and she’d get upset and try not to show it. As awful as graduation would be, he feels even worse when his mom’s upset. So Tim just stands and listens and seethes at nothing.  
 

He’s angry his whole graduation day, which doesn’t seem any more momentous to him than signing a paper to agree that he’d not rob the gas station had. His first  _real job;_ his first  _real life_ , which the kids who’d performed best at his school wished him and his class well with through a microphone. As if the rest of his life hadn’t been real.  
Tim smiles anyway, of course, and takes his diploma while shaking his principal’s hand, because his mom is watching and he wants her to be happy. On the inside he wants to yell and maybe punch things and yell and yell.

  
Dr. Scott has been saying to him for years that anger is a mask for deeper feelings.

Under Tim’s anger is more anger, and sandwiched beside it is worry and a nameless, familiar fear.

 

He’s started seeing the faceless spectre in the branches outside of his room's window at night, every night, again. It watches him. It has been for months.  
Tim hasn’t lost any time, though. He hasn’t run away (yet). He clings to that; he’s not totally gone off the deep end again (yet).  
He can’t tell anyone. He doesn’t want to go back to the hospital, doesn’t want to up his medication to a fog again, doesn’t want his mom to look at him like-- like everyone else did, he can’t do it. The thing in the window is always gone by morning.  
When Dr. Scott noticed that he looked paler than usual in their last few appointments, Tim complained about exam stress. He asks his mom if his room could get curtains, but doesn’t say why.

He should’ve told someone.  
  
  
  
*

  
  
Tim is eighteen.  
  
Eighteen, and--  
  
Imagine coming home after your afternoon shift and when you open the door the smell of noodles is simmering in the air, so you know your mom is home early. Imagine you’re tired but you’ve been thinking of music your whole walk back from work, and you go into the kitchen to ask your mom if she wanted to play some Beatles together later.  
Imagine suddenly seeing her prone on the floor, coughing so hard dribbles of red leak out the sides of her mouth, and there's a  _thing_ outside the kitchen window, a thing that you know isn't therebut it looks like it is, it always does, later you don't even remember what it looks like other than just a painful shimmering blur of  _not-right_ on the other side of the glass, and it hurts, and it’s hurting  _her._  
Think about that.  
  
In the moment itself Tim doesn’t have time to think. The thing outside the window freezes his blood and makes his head pound until he can't see; that's how the attacks start, how he blacks out and wakes up with lost hours or days, but he can't have an attack now, his mom  _needs him--_  
He drops his backpack on the floor, lurches to the kitchen sink, grabbing his medication out of his pocket as he does. He opens the bottle with a trembling hand and downs two pills; he guzzles straight from the sink tap until he can swallow them without choking. When he can breathe again he throws himself down at his mother's side and grabs her shoulders, too scared to shake her in case she hurt her neck when she’d fallen.  
He yells, “Mom!  _Mom!_ ”  
He cries, “What’s going on? No, no, no--”

The pounding in his head increases to a sharp insect-whine and his mother doesn't say anything back. She stops coughing, stops moving. Tim can’t breathe.  
Without looking away from her face he feels around on the countertop that’s right above him, scattering a bunch of things he can’t see across the counter with his clumsy grabs. Some of them fall on the floor with a clatter he barely hears. Finally he closes his hand around the phone. He pulls it down to him, keeping one hand on his mom’s shoulder like that’ll help. He says, choking, “Hold on, it’s—it’s-- stay with me, Mom."  
He has to dial 911 three times before he gets all the numbers right.

The paramedics arrive at the house ten minutes later. Tim had left the door unlocked so they come straight in, and Tim is still sitting by his mom on the floor. Panic’s made him mostly numb. He doesn’t want to leave her, but they pull him away.  
Tim flinches away from the unfamiliar arms, throwing himself sideways into the kitchen cupboard. When he looks up he sees that one of the paramedics is from _that hospital_ ; he was one of the staff who had to come find Tim when he ran away into Rosswood. Tim feels like a quart of ice got dumped into his stomach.  
The paramedic recognizes Tim, too; he looks surprised, and then his expression closes off. “What happened?”  
“I don’t know,” Tim stutters, tears making it hard for him to see. He pushes himself off the floor with one hand and wipes his face unsuccessfully with the other. “I just got home--”  
“You need to move,” the paramedic interrupts him, and then he’s practically shoving Tim out of the way of him and the other emergency staff.  
Tim stumbles into the living room, not able to tear himself away much more than the other side of the dining table. “What are you doing?” He asks, loudly, hugging himself so hard he feels like he’ll crunch his own ribs. Another paramedic—it seems like there’s so many of them—had gone into Tim and his mom’s tiny kitchen with a stretcher, and they load her onto it while Tim shakes. He can’t seem to shut up, can only ask over and over what was happening to her, if she'd be okay. The paramedics don't say anything to him. But they must hear him, they must.  
Once his mom is on the stretcher they strap a terrifying oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, and then carry her out the door away from him.  
Tim stumbles after them, hands and feet suddenly freezing. “Wait! Where--”  
The one who'd been at the hospital where Tim had stayed looks over at him, holding up a hand so Tim stops in his tracks. “We’re taking her in for observation,” he says, in sharp nurse tones. “Wait here until someone else comes home. Don’t try anything.”

  
Fury spikes in Tim’s chest. He inhales, almost gasping, but he can’t form words to explain that there  _wasn't_ anyone else.  
And then the paramedics were gone, the apartment cold and silent behind them.  
  
They left the door open, so Tim has to close it and lock it himself. He does, then sinks to the floor beside it with his head against his knees. He’s shaking, not because of a seizure but because he was crying. Everything was his fault. His fault, again.

  
He doesn’t know how long he sits there, sobbing into his jeans.  Through his existential crisis, though, the stove is still on. Eventually all the water boils off from the noodles and they burn to the bottom of the pot.  
It's the smoke alarm that gets Tim up, finally, scrambling and unsure of his feet at the loud screeching. He stares with wide eyes at the mess on the stove, feeling detached and vaguely sick.  
Then his sense kicks in: numbly, but moving, he gets the pot off the stove and into the sink. He grabs a chair from the dinette to stand on and waves an old dish-towel in front of the alarm to ease it out of its panic. Once it’s quiet, he mechanically puts the chair back in the living room and goes to clean up the dishes.  
The whole kitchen still stinks of burning. When he reaches towards the window automatically, wanting to open it to let clear air in, there’s nothing there.  
  
His legs start shaking too much for him to stand up. Tim sits on the floor again, leaning against the fridge while he waits to stop trembling.  
He realizes—with a yawning despair in his chest, too terrifying to look into for long-- that for all his world was in pieces, it would keep going.  
Nothing would ever really stop.

 

///


	4. Chapter 4

Tim is nineteen and living in dorms, the second time in his life he’s lived somewhere other than home with his mom. It’s much better than the first time.

  
He got accepted into the local college he’d applied to, and so he enrolled. Only a couple weeks after his birthday he was packing up his room into boxes. Tim buys himself a carton of cigarettes as a late birthday present and smokes about ten on the way to the college. It’s a two hour drive. He listens to music on the crappy CD player in the car on the way, moves all the stuff to room 416 (a single at the end of the hallway), and then drives back to his apartment in his hometown. The next day he takes a Greyhound back to what’ll be his college town, and then stays.  
The first week is super strange. There aren’t classes yet and everyone’s busy with these freshman exercises he’d previously thought were only weird All-American fantasies, not things actual humans did. Living in a dorm feels kind of living in a hive of people. There’s always something going on somewhere. Tim spends a lot of time in his room, but he can leave whenever he wants. That’s important.  
The first week was also when you had to pay all the rent and tuition for the first half of the year. Tuition sucked. He’s managing on most of his saved wages over the last three years, plus future-crippling loans and a few vaguely pitying grants ( _Single Parent Household? Low Income?_ ) that made him grateful but also wanting to punch someone's teeth.  
When classes do start up he takes all the gen eds his schedule can fit, plus film and music electives. For the most part they’re interesting, although they’re all a lot of work. He doesn’t mind much.  
He’s out of his depth and lonely, but what else is new. He keeps trying.

  
Every weekend he spends some time with his mom over the phone. The first few times they call they just swap news. She’s working at her same job, still okay with it though her hours have been cut down a little recently. She’s happy he’s trying his luck out away from their town.  
She's also a little worried that he'll fall and no one will be there to help him, although of course she doesn't phrase it like that.  
Tim reminds her that he's contacted the college's student services and explained about his seizures, so the staff know and will be able to assist him if he needs it. (They don't know about the mental issues, and he's not going to mention it. Something Tim appreciates about being a legal adult is that he doesn't have to tell everyone his entire medical history if he doesn't want to. Something he appreciates about being in a different town is that people didn't already _know._ )   
She says, "I know, honey, I just worry," and then again, "I'm proud of you." Her voice is wobbling a little but she's okay.  
  
  
She’s okay, thank God. She’s been okay since coming home from the hospital with nothing so bad as a bandage on her head, a couple days after Tim had found her on the floor. Her job’s insurance actually helped pay some of the ludicrous ambulance and ER bill. The doctors said that she'd only fallen; the blood she’d been coughing up was just from a bitten tongue, and the headache she’d had for days afterwards (that Tim shared) was of course from her hitting her head on the corner of the counter. The cough was smokers' lung. There was nothing supernatural about any of it.  
His mom didn't remember anything having been at the other side of the window. Tim convinces himself he’d just been panicking when he’d seen the thing. Nothing strange at all.  
Still, he hadn't been able to shake the feeling that his mom would be safer away from him. He knew it was irrational.    
He still feels a little better now that he's moved onto campus and has to call her to talk to her, instead of walking a couple blocks. Distance means safety.  
  
  
  
*

  
  
Tim is twenty and he has a friend. He’d just walked up to Tim having a late dinner alone in the terrible university bar (the caf was closed) and introduced himself, and hadn't minded too much when Tim didn't seem to know what to say. He compliments Tim’s hair, and laughs when Tim says, “Thanks. Uh, I got it for my birthday.”   
His name's Brian. He looks like the kind of guy who'd star in his high school's drama productions. He's in the film program too, in his first year. Brian doesn't follow Tim around or anything but it's not a very big campus, so they run into each other a lot. (Figuratively.) Brian's smile is like a spotlight beam. After a couple of weeks Tim stops looking over his shoulder for the person Brian's looking for and starts smiling back.  
  
They first hang out because Brian offers to partner with Tim on a Photography Basics project. They get the project done, and then they keep meeting up weekly afterwards. They walk to classes together. Brian's good at conversation, sliding easily from one subject to another while leaving enough gaps for Tim to contribute if he wants to.  
Tim tells his mom about the project over a phone call, and she says that Brian sounds like "a nice boy". It makes Tim snort out loud, and his mom laughs back, but is objectively true. Brian's easy-going, friendly, funny, most stuff that Tim isn't.  
He's not the kind of person Tim expects to hang around someone like him, but he does anyway.   
  
  
One day when they stop at Tim's dorm room--they both forgot their textbook, and Tim's place was closest-- Brian spots the pill bottles on Tim's nightstand. Tim, with a surge of panic, almost backs out the door. But Brian doesn't accuse him of lying or run out into the hallway to tell everyone he's a psychopath. He ignores them completely, pretty much, walking over to Tim's college-supplied flatboard bookshelf and grabbing the  _Communications 1._  "Okey-doke, let's get to class," he says brightly when he turns around.   
"They’re for seizures," Tim says outright. He's still standing by the door, hugging himself in a way that he hopes doesn't look like he's hugging himself. "I have seizures, sometimes. And some other stuff. I've taken medication for them since I was a little kid."  
Brian doesn’t even blink. He just nods slowly. "Are you-- do you think you'll have one now?" He asks, concern written all over his face.  
"... no? They're not on a schedule, or anything." Tim does feel dizzy but he thinks that may be from the panic. He walks over to his bed and sits down on the edge, grateful for the steadiness of the wall as he leans against it.  
Brian sits down beside him. "One of my cousins has photo-sensitive epilepsy," he starts. "She's had it since she was a little kid, too, but it was only when she got older that they really recognized what it was and what, like, triggered it. She has to take medications too. She carries them around in a little Hello Kitty mini-purse in her backpack. It's kind of adorable actually."  
"Huh," Tim says.  
"They let her have an easier time in school and using computers and everything. It's not that big of a deal. She's a happy kid. Sometimes her days need more planning than other peoples', but everyone kind of pitches in with anything they can help."   
"Okay," Tim says when it seems like Brian's done talking.  
"Is there anything I can do to help?" Brian asks.  
Tim spends a second processing that. He looks at the tops of his knees because it's easier than looking up, but he still has a smile tugging on his face. He feels a lot lighter than he had about ten minutes ago. "Thanks," he says.   
"No problem," Brian says easily, and it probably isn't a problem at all for him.  They skip class and watch old Star Trek episodes on Tim's laptop until lunch.   
  
After that, Brian invites himself over once or twice a week. He always goes somewhere else without complaint if Tim doesn't feel like being around anyone. Those kinds of moods still hit Tim, but other times he looks forward to hearing Brian's four-taps knock on his door.   
It's... it's better. A lot better than spending most of his time outside of class alone. He's doing better.  
  
  
Tim hadn’t talked to a lot of people in his first year here. He hadn’t trusted them much. He talks to people now, though, because Brian brings him to parties.  
When Brian first suggests it Tim shook his head before Brian's even finished talking. He says he has a lot of work to do, and it's not a lie, but it's not why he doesn't want to go. Crowds have never been Tim's strong suit. Not that he's really had experience with them much, but it definitely seems like the kind of thing that would lead to the walls closing down behind him wherever he moves, which he does have experience with.  
Brian doesn't blame him at all. Tim still feels kind of bad about it.   
The second time Brian suggests Tim come with him to a "hang out", Tim gathers up courage and agrees.   
They meet up at the room about ten minutes past eight, and Tim feels a little relieved even as Brian knocks on the door. There's fifteen people there, maximum. Tim had been picturing a huge cross-campus bar crawl-- this is much less intimidating.  
The door opens to a swell of noise, and Tim almost reconsiders before Brian calls out to someone and waves. Brian steps inside like he went there all the time; it's a double room, so it's a little more space than what Tim's used to, and there are people on every surface. Brian motions Tim over to a corner by the window and introduces him to several other film students who Tim hadn't kept track of until then.  "This is my buddy Tim," he says. No one's called Tim their friend out loud before. People laugh with Brian, smile at Tim. Tim manages smiles back.  
Later in the night, when Brian is cheerfully drunk, shirtless and giving everyone loud kisses on the cheek, Tim laughs so much he almost drops his canned soda.  
  
He’s doing better.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
Tim is twenty-one when Brian's sneak-recruits him into doing a film project with him and this kid Alex Kralie. The whole set-up had been a bit of a sorry affair; Alex had clearly been sitting in an empty classroom for a while when Brian and Tim walked in. The empty sign-up sheet was evidence if nothing else. Tim feels bad enough about it to sign his name on the line.  
Him and Brian talk about the movie over some Indian food later that night, especially the character's fortuitous name choices. Brian and Tim, the handsome main character and his protege, and apparently a girl named Sarah as the love interest who's to be played by a girl named Sarah.   
  
Alex doesn't seem so bad. His script is terrible and cliche, everything about it screaming "film student who's trying too hard".  Brian’s so cheerful about it that Tim doesn’t mind. 

The rest of the students that Alex recruited for the film seem pretty okay. The whole group is in the same year as Tim. They all do the best they can with the stuff Alex writes. Sarah Not The Love Interest is sarcastic in a way that Tim appreciates; her boyfriend Seth is both loyal and competent; and this kid named Jay who functions as Alex's lackey and camera operator is cooler than he looks. They’re a friendly crowd to go to the occasional bar with and nod at between classes. It’s nice to have a group.  
Despite the material, Tim finds out that he really kind of likes acting.

 

Tim is twenty-one, and--  
and--

   
  
*

  
  
Tim is twenty-two, and he's been feeling a little isolated lately. Brian's not around so much anymore. (It's not anything Tim did, he is sure of that, because Brian would tell him otherwise.)    
  
Along with that, Tim’s mom got cut out of her job and decided to move to a new place, but lost her cell phone in the process. Tim offers to buy one for her when he drives out to see her on the long weekend, but she refuses-- “That's your money, Tim, you've earned it.”  
Her new apartment is much smaller than theirs had been when Tim was growing up, and that one hadn't been huge to begin with.   
  
With no one to see and no one to call, he spends a lot of time in his room. He studies. He hands things in.   
  
  
He thinks maybe he’d feel better if he had more extracurriculars. The next day Tim goes out and gets a second-hand banjo and ukulele to keep his guitar company in its case under his bed.  
String instruments aren’t a substitute for people, but they keep him busy enough to not mind for a while.  
   


*

 

Tim is twenty-three when he voluntarily withdraws from university. It feels like giving up but also like relief. Class has gotten really… really hard to deal with, this year.

 

Filling out all of the forms is annoying, and making hesitant plans of where he’ll live once his on-campus residence contract expires is frightening. The worst part, though, is telling his mom. He really should wait until he’s face to face to tell her, but it feels like he used up all of his energy for confrontations in real life. So he calls her on her apartment's landline instead.  
He can feel the disappointment in the short pause between when he says it and when she next breathes. Still, she responds with, “I’m sorry to hear that, sweetheart. But you’re right, you need to look after your health first.”  
Tim took a deep breath and nods, even though she couldn’t see him. He also squeezes his eyes shut against the tears, to no avail. “Thanks- uh, I have to go.”  
"You do? Oh." She sounds a little startled, but still replies, "Well goodnight then. I love you.”  
He presses his hand on his eye and says, “I love you too, Mom.”   
  
Then Tim hangs up and drops his phone on his bed. He sits down with both his hands over his face, breathing out shakily. He'd half-convinced himself she'd yell at or scold him when he'd called, which obviously hadn't happened, but he still feels kind of awful.  
His next inhale gets caught in his throat. He grabs around on his small flatboard nightstand for his medication and goes over to his sink, dropping two pills into his palm as he walks. He takes his medication with a cup of water and looks in the mirror afterwards, trying to catch his own eyes. 

   
He still goes to his year’s planned graduation, mostly to see if he can spot Brian. Tim doesn't see his friend around anywhere.   
Alex whatshisname isn't there either, or the other students who were in the brief project with him. That’s weird. Tim is pretty sure they were all in the same year. Then again, maybe he’s gotten confused. Tim is having trouble remembering much about Alex, or that pet project he was working on with everybody. Tim remembers other students but not their names.  
He guesses it doesn’t matter much. He’s sure they’re okay, maybe moved on to greener pastures. He leaves the ceremony early and goes home.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
Tim is twenty-four and he shares a very small, mostly-not-shitty house with one roommate who keeps to herself. They have a chore chart on the wall in the living room that gets done every week, and they nod at each other when they cross paths in the morning, and that’s about it. Tim’s okay with that.

  
He's still in his college town. He guesses it's just his town now.  
After officially leaving school, he'd spent a couple months being low-grade terrified all the time and applying everywhere a mentally ill drop-out could apply. He managed to land a job in a corporation’s warehouse sorting through steel chips for irregular shapes. Thanks to the union, he makes decent wage. Enough money for his share of rent and food and sometimes for weekend trips over to Birmingham.  
Birmingham is where his mom and his aunt live together. His mom never actually got another cell phone, but she's somewhere safe and seen. Tim is quietly grateful for that every day. Obviously she can take care of herself-- she'd gotten a better job than he had after trying for about as long, and she's a grown adult.  He just gets worried when he doesn’t have any contact with her. For a while there it'd seemed like everyone he loved was disappearing from around him at once, for no reason at all.   
But it’s fine. She’s doing fine, and his aunt is doing fine. When he visits they give him black coffee and pieces from cakes that Aunt Charlotte decorates for a living, and they ask him how he is. Tim tells them he's doing okay.

He is.

Until he isn't, but he doesn't change what he says.   
  
  
He’s going to regular doctor appointments again, a different person but the same practice as he'd gone to in high school. He doesn't tell the doctor everything, because Tim can't remember everything. He can't think about that too much.  
He keeps busy. He takes his medication.

 

He wakes up in the woods sometimes but he can't let himself think. In a way he's never actually in the woods. He knows that and it's confusing and infuriating. Someone else walking along with his feet, sitting in his head, using his eyes, wiping everything clean in his mind before it-- he?-- leaves. The same as when he’s a little kid, but he knows so much better now, and in a way that makes it worse.  
He knows he could look what's happening to him up online. There are tons of studies and articles he could read, some testimonials he could look up. He doesn't want to. It'd be too much like too many doctors raking through his head for items to fit their checklists, and... it's terrifying. It's legitimately terrifying. The entire idea of being so out of control, so liable to hurt someone.   
_Violent episodes._  
  
He wakes up one morning and his roommate is gone. No note, no message on the answering machine, nothing. Tim can't remember when he's seen her last. He files a police report but he can't find any recent pictures of her, and he realizes with a jolt he has no idea where her parents live or if they have her last name, or anything. The police promise to do the best they can to find her, but even as Tim leaves the station he has doubts.  He feels sick. 

The next day he wakes up two weeks later, in the middle of a nothing field with blood in his hair.  
  
  
Tim is twenty-four and he forgets, and he sees, and he forgets.   
  
  
  
*   
  
  
Tim is twenty-five and he sees everything.   
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
Tim is twenty-six and he's overthinking things again.  
He's back in his old neighborhood, which is at least half of the problem. _They're_  back in his old neighborhood. Him and Jay have been on the road for weeks, and they've finally looped around to where the whole mess started. He recognizes the streets and remembers walking down them to and from the awful years that were public school, but damn if he can name what hotel they're set up in.  
The rooms are all one big neutral-colour-schemed blur in Tim's head. This one isn't any different, except that (mercifully) it's a smoking room.  Tim sits by the open window. Jay lying badly over the phone makes for familiar background noise.

  
“Hey. Um, it's me again.” Jay coughs, momentarily turning his head away from his phone. “I'm in the state still, sort of far from y'all though. Still hotel hopping. The, uh, the documentary is going okay. I'm progressing.”  He never stops moving when he's nervous; he covers his mouth with his hand while he clears his throat, then sticks his hand in his hoodie pocket, walking a dust track into the thin carpet.  “I thought you should know, when you-- or when whoever's at home get this message, I might, um. I might not call back for a while.”

  
Tim tunes him out. Jay is trying to protect his family by not going to see them, or maybe they're not talking to him for some other reason. Tim hasn't pried about it. He inhales some cancer and thinks about his own small, fragmented family. He thinks about Jessica too. Her parents most likely didn't know where she was, either.  
Guilt twists Tim's stomach unpleasantly. Jay's the only friend he has, at this point, and Tim's been lying to him for months. But he'll understand. When it's time, it'll make sense to Jay why Tim kept this from him. It has to.      
  
“Goodbye,” Jay says in the background. There's a brief pause before he adds, “I love you,” and then hangs up the phone. He tosses it on the hotel bed and sits on the edge, sighing into his hands.

  
“... you alright?” Tim asks after a minute. He can't ask if  “everything” is alright, because the answer would be an obvious negative.  
“It's okay as I expected it to be.” Jay's voice is muffled by his hands, but Tim gets the gist.  
“Why do you keep calling them if they never answer you? They've gotten the hint after all of these messages now.” He doesn't mean it badly. He means to add something like,  _you deserve people who answer your phone calls,_  but who talked like that? Really? The words get stuck in his throat.  
“They're my parents,” Jay replies exasperatedly. “I can't just-- not tell them where I am or if I'm going to get back to them. They'd worry or something.” He picks his phone up again and fiddles with it. “… it's nice thinking that someone would notice if I just disappeared.”  
Tim would notice if Jay went somewhere. He doesn't say that, though. He knows it's not really the same thing. When he'd been younger, there'd always been someone to notice when he'd disappear and were waiting for him when he got back, but most of the time it wasn't who he'd wanted to see. Doctors aren't parents aren't friends-- or travel partners, whatever he and Jay were.  


Jay looks over, detective eyes narrowing a little.  _Here it comes,_ Tim thought, just as Jay says, “What about you? You said stuff about your mom...”  
“Well. Yeah.” Tim had re-watched the entries a couple of days ago for lack of anything else to do or the motivation to do it. Seeing himself spill out his guts in the hospital like that hadn't been any less strange than actually doing it, especially knowing it'd be broadcast. He doesn't regret it though, telling the truth. Not at this point. “I still see her sometimes,” he replies. “I just, uh. We don’t talk too much. She lives off in Birmingham now, she has to work about as much as I do. Did.” None of those were strictly lies. He'd stopped phoning his mom weekly when Jay had shown up, bringing trouble with him.  
  
“But you haven't even called anybody,” Jay says. Pressing, as always; at least he was trying to make conversation. “At least not when we've been on the road.”  
Tim inhales but then his voice catches in his throat and he can't dislodge it, even while coughing fit to break a lung. He turns away for a minute before getting it under control.   
When he looks up Jay's standing, worry and something like pity bright in his eyes, about to reach out.   
Tim waves him off. “It’s—I’m fine.” He coughs again. “Really.”  
“Take the water at least, Jesus.”  
“Fine.” He catches the bottle Jay tosses to him and opens it, clearing his throat. Both of them were getting more sickly lately, and neither of them were ever going to voice what that probably meant. 

  
“But your mom,” Jay says after Tim's recovered. He's never someone to let something lie on its own.  
“Yeah." Tim studies his hand. "It's, with all this... I don't really want to get her involved.”  _Again,_ he adds to himself with the sick feeling. Tim’s head throbs. He's careful not to wince.  
“... yeah,” Jay says. He sits back on the bed and stares down through the floor, like the carpet was a slideshow of everything he regretted.   
Jessica, of course. Not looking anywhere in particular, Tim breathes deeply and steadily until his stomach settles.  


“Sorry,” Jay says, eventually. He doesn’t say what for.  
“Don't worry about it,” Tim replies, putting the bottle cap back on his water. After a few seconds of deliberation, he goes over to sit by Jay on the bed.  
Jay looks up at him and pauses, but then nods, closing the topic. 

  
They flip the hotel TV on and talk about something else.

 

   
////


End file.
